1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to the management of postings to a discussion forum resource.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include instant messaging, application sharing, shared document libraries and discussion forums.
In the conventional discussion forum, collaborators post message to a common document referred to as a “black board”. Whenever a collaborator posts a message to the black board, other participant collaborators can view the comments, though some conventional discussion forum implementations control access to discussion boards according to access control lists and the like. In any event, discussion forums typically are passive modes of collaboration in which collaborators view one another's postings asynchronously when convenient. Still, some discussion forums are more active in nature in as much as an e-mail can be transmitted to “members” of a discussion form when a new posting occurs.
Generally, discussion forums follow a temporal sequence when formatting postings. In this regard, each posting is placed after the next in order of the time when the posting was placed in the discussion forum. As a result, one can follow multiple conversations through a single reading of the discussion forum as two adjacent postings are not necessarily related to one another. It will be recognized by the skilled artisan, then, that a single discussion forum can become unwieldy when too many conversations regarding too many topics are placed in sequence in a single forum. To address this issue, most discussion forums are subdivided into separate topic threads in order to provided enhanced readability in regard to the postings of any one topic thread.
The discussion forum resource has become a ubiquitous component of collaborative environments. A keyword searching of the Web space literally can produce tens of thousands of resulting links to discussion forums disposed about the World Wide Web. Despite the diversity of topic threads in Web space, it will not surprise the skilled artisan to note that substantial topic overlap exists between different discussion resources. Yet, as a collaborator, to participate in posting and viewing comments about different topic threads having similar topical content in different discussion resources can be time consuming and terribly inefficient. To that end, a substantial deficiency remains in the collaborative environment in respect to the management of topically related postings in a discussion forum resource.